Making ethics codes more effective

Many businesses and organizations of all types have adopted ethics codes or codes of conduct. Examples relevant to geoscience include the Cape Town Statement on Geoethics of the International Association for Promoting Geoethics,  the Scientific Integrity and Professional Ethics policy of the American Geophysical Union, and the Joint EGU-AGU Statement of principles for a  code of ethics for the geosciences. The Government of Canada is implementing a Science Integrity Policy across its science-related Departments. Successful implementation of such policies can be challenging and many breaches have been and continue to be reported. Humans make ethical or unethical decisions and understanding the sociological processes that are involved and applying this knowledge to the implementation of ethics codes may improve their success rates. This paper analyzes these sociological processes through the lens of symbolic interactionism theory. In spite of its somewhat forbidding name, the theory is actually quite simple. It shows how interactions between people lead to the meanings they give to other people, organizations and things. It describes how these meanings lead to the interpretation of situations, and how groups arrive at normative decisions based on this interpretation. These normative decisions involve ethical considerations. The paper describes the approach and seeks audience feedback on a proposed survey of the members of the International Association for Promoting Geoethics  to collect empirical evidence on which to base a symbolic interactionist approach to effective implementation of ethics codes in geoscience.